“It still doesn’t make fucking sense to me,” Bael mumbled.
Thierry sighed and recited a human, Turkish proverb, “The forest was shrinking, but the trees kept voting for the axe, for theaxe was clever and convinced the trees that because his handle was made of wood, he was one of them.”
Thierry said, “Kellan Oadess has a talent for convincing people that he is on their side.”
“There are no sides,” Nix muttered under her breath, remembering what the Goddess said. Granted, the Goddess had been talking about matehood.
Nix shook her head. “So, this drug to trigger a heat cycle in a winged shifter, it could be true, then? True that the threat of going into heat by taking classes with alphas is actually a manufactured threat to keep the females in line?”
“Wouldn’t put it past him,” Bael said.
The group landed in front of the tall, dark wooden doors of Dean Felling’s office.
“Do you know how you want this to go down, Nixie?” Bael asked.
“He will feel threatened to have all of us enter unannounced,” Persius noted.
“Especially after he threatened to expel you the last time we accompanied you to his office,” Thierry added.
“We just need to know about where we can find the new potions professor that he plans to replace Bowen with. Mr. Lemmuns,” Nix said. “We need to find him, grab him, and get him to tell us about the other missing students.”
Bael swung his gaze to Thierry. “Think you can stomach I-T, Stoney?” Bael asked him.
“I-T?”
Bael’s grin consumed his face. “Interrogation and torture.”
Thierry’s eyebrow quirked. “You think me squeamish?”
“I ‘think you’ stuffy and snobby and—”
“Nix said that this ‘Mr. Lemmuns’ tortured her in a cage before she died.” Thierry replied dryly, “Do not worry about my stone-lined stomach, Baelfire.”
The incubus snorted. “Oh shit, are you gonna blur your sophisticated ‘moral lines’ for our girl?”
Nix hesitantly met Thierry’s stunning and intense silver gaze as it bored into her face.
Thierry stated in his genuine and gravelly voice, “Nix, knowing that I hurt you—in any goddamn timeline—makes me want to rip my heart from my chest and place it into your palm. If at any point you wish me to do so, you need only ask.”
Nix bit her lip. It was hard to stay mad at him when he literally offered his life as penance for something afuture versionof him did.
Thierry looked back at Bael. “So, for any other who dares to harm my mate, I am willing to do much, much worse.”
Ryker nodded. “Good.”
Maybe others would be uncomfortable about their mates openly discussing torturing someone who hurt them, but…Nix felt good. Protected.
Because if anyone harmed one of my mates…
Nix growled under her breath as she stepped forward to open the door to the office. “We all go in together.”
CHAPTER 34
Something was…wrong. Because the second Dean Felling looked up from his dark wooden desk and saw Nix walk into his office, his entire body shuddered with fear.
Fear. Of Nix.
“Uh,” Nix muttered as she lost a little confidence to the confusing reaction of the dean to her presence. “Dean Felling, can I speak with you?”
